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Building a Home Online to Suit Electronic Music

The music industry’s latest gold rush is over dance music, which lures tens of thousands of fans to festivals and dominates pop radio.

But to Seth Goldstein, a technology entrepreneur who was one of the creators of Turntable.fm, last year’s hot music start-up, the dance world is missing something essential: an online hub for mainstream fans, gathering news, music and videos from all the corners of the Internet. He compares the idea to MTV in the 1980s, which created a broad mainstream audience for music videos, thus drawing advertisers.

“MTV was nominally about Duran Duran and Run-DMC,” Mr. Goldstein said in an interview. “But really it was about reaching suburban Jewish kids outside Boston like me who wanted to be them. What they did so well was to sell that audience to advertisers at scale.”

With his new company, DJZ, Mr. Goldstein wants to fill this gap. On Halloween, it plans to introduce a Web site, mobile app and YouTube channel that will aggregate news and media on electronic dance music — also known as E.D.M. — and package it with colorful design and an attitude celebrating top D.J.’s as cultural heroes.

If successful, the company could capitalize on a rapidly expanding audience. But DJZ is entering a market crowded with other corporate powers, like Live Nation Entertainment and SFX Entertainment, that are also going after what until recently has been an independent and self-sufficient subculture.

The problem for fans of E.D.M., as Mr. Goldstein and his business partners see it, is not a lack of information and media about their favorite acts. Rather, there has been a noisy abundance of it, scattered across countless Web sites, YouTube channels, Twitter feeds and apps.

“Electronic music is fragmented in a way that other genres of music aren’t fragmented,” said Troy Carter, the tech-minded manager of Lady Gaga, who is one of DJZ’s investors. “Within three clicks, you can find out everything you need to know about pop. But electronic music is not well curated. To find out about events or get recommendations, it’s not easy.”

The plan for DJZ is to be something like dance music’s combination of The Huffington Post and MTV: a daily destination for as broad an audience as possible, well stocked with entertaining media and, eventually, ads. In its Web incarnation, the site’s main page features a grid of cartoonish avatars of big D.J.’s like Skrillex and Deadmau5, along with news feeds, songs, tutorials and fan-friendly features like a guide to making a version of Deadmau5’s signature mouse-shaped headgear.

Photo

Seth Goldstein, standing, plans a site aggregating news and media on electronic dance music.Credit
Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

Users can choose a “D.J. name” for their identity on the site. Ms. Redstone, the 58-year-old president of National Amusements and daughter of the media mogul Sumner M. Redstone, has already picked hers: DJ Theatrix. (“I don’t want to date myself, but I grew up with this music,” she said. “It’s been around forever.”)

The company’s name is also a play on words referring to Generation Z, its intended market, whose members were born in the 1990s and are immersed in social networks. As Mr. Goldstein sees it, they are the ones watching YouTube videos by the tens of millions but who cannot afford a trip to the big festivals like Coachella or Electric Daisy Carnival.

“Having a destination online for Gen Z to come and consume and share info in a space they were already working within will be really special,” Mr. Oakenfold said in a statement.

Online, individual artists and properties can draw enormous online followings: the Ultra label, for example, has had 1.8 billion views on its YouTube page. Yet while plenty of online magazines and blogs serve the dance audience, their audiences are relatively small.

Resident Advisor, one of the genre’s online magazines, says it reaches one million readers, but according to the Internet measurement service comScore, over the last six months it has drawn an average of 114,000 visitors a month in the United States; another news site, Dancing Astronaut, has had an average of 44,000 in that time. By comparison, the indie-rock site Pitchfork draws nearly one million visitors each month, and Rolling Stone three million, according to comScore.

Jason Bentley, the music director of KCRW, a public radio station in Santa Monica, Calif., said this was partly a result of the music’s existing press continuing to address a connoisseur audience as the genre crossed over to pop.

“Maybe the scene is having a bit of an identity crisis,” Mr. Bentley said. “Because all of these people worked so hard for the sake of the credibility of dance music, and now, in a matter of a couple of years, it’s blown the doors off. Maybe those people are a bit reluctant to see it all the way to the pop side for fear of alienating their core fans.”

DJZ is not the only company that wants to build a large marketing audience out of the disparate strands of E.D.M.’s festivals and online media. Sponsorship and audience aggregation have been a critical piece of Live Nation’s strategy for years. And when Robert F. X. Sillerman of SFX returned to the concert business this year after an absence of a decade, he said he would spend up to $1 billion buying promoters and figuring out how to market to dance audiences after they leave the festival and wash off their neon body paint.

Another question for Mr. Goldstein and his investors is whether DJZ can escape the fate of Turntable.fm, a gamelike social listening service, which lost momentum after making a big splash.

For Mr. Goldstein, success for DJZ will depend on offering young dance-music fans something easily consumable yet with enough integrity to get them coming back for more.

“I just think it’s a mess out there,” he said, “and there’s a way to make it easier and more enjoyable without making it Cliff Notes.”

A version of this article appears in print on September 12, 2012, on page B4 of the New York edition with the headline: Building a Home Online To Suit Electronic Music. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe